Introduction
By Ian Jones
First published on November 2007
Five years ago, Channel 4′s 20th birthday was marked on screen with barely a murmur. Richard Whiteley essayed his usual “as one countdown ends” schtick, but that was more or less it. It seemed nobody was in the mood for a party.
Admittedly the news the channel had just made its first loss since 1993 and hundreds of redundancies were on the way can’t have helped. But still, an anniversary is an anniversary, and worth noting even if it’s merely to acknowledge: we survived.
Fast forward five years, and it’s a very different story. Sister channel More4 has devoted an entire month to programmes from the C4 archive, and not merely your obvious candidates like The Tube and Brookside. We’ve had editions of long-forgotten staples such as Opinions and Without Walls, an episode of Right to Reply, once-flagship dramas including The Nation’s Health and Mr Pye, and even Quilts In Women’s Lives (“The archetypal Channel 4 programme title”, according to founding boss Jeremy Isaacs).
Elsewhere, special versions of the classic C4 theme tune and logo have unfurled across screens, a bumper two-hour documentary rustled up tales both familiar and obscure, and a towering metal number “4″ has been erected outside the station’s headquarters.
It’s all been highly entertaining and judiciously nostalgic. Yet it’s also served as a reminder, perhaps inevitably, of the scores of differences between Channel 4 as it was, and how it is now.
To be sure, there are obvious cosmetic and thematic contrasts. Faces, attitudes, obsessions have all changed. Styles of programme-making have dated along with their subject matter. You’d never see a show like Union World on TV today.
But there’s something else. Something less tangible. It’s to do with perception and the way the channel carries itself.
Once it was possible to feel a bit of a frisson when you switched over to Channel 4. The station embodied an air of danger – sometimes very slight, but it was always there. Likewise a sense of getting away with breaking rules, and a pride in wanting to do something different and to do it spectacularly well.
Outside factors helped. Your parents disapproved of you watching it. Your mates ridiculed you if you didn’t. And the press hated it, not for procedural gaffes or contrived controversies, but simply for “daring” to show this or that programme.
As such it was almost a badge of honour to name it as your favourite TV station.
Nowadays, switching on Channel 4 doesn’t involve a frisson so much as a feeling of defeat. It has become a last resort for channel-hoppers.
What has happened to that mix of enigmatic disrespect and jaunty subversion? Where are the programmes that turn the world upside down and make you laugh louder than you’ve ever done before? Dammit, why does it not feel different anymore?
Maybe it’s to do with age. A bit like how the greatest issues of the NME are always those you read when you were 15, perhaps the greatest years of Channel 4 are always those you watched when you were, say, at university. Or 12. Or leaving school.
Maybe it’s not meant to be cherished as a channel once you’re grown up, merely accommodated.
In which case it follows there’s a generation currently doing their GCSEs for whom Channel 4 is the best telly on the planet. Which, you’ll agree, sounds preposterous. So can it really be that this is still a station that people not only like, but love?
The heart might argue its corner, but inside your head there’s a nagging feeling that, for all the future might bring, the days of Channel 4 inspiring a deep, emotional attachment among viewers are over, lost to history along with Light Lunch, The Art of Landscape, Trak Trix and Babble.
This collection of features incorporates all the content OTT produced for Channel 4′s 20th birthday, plus new detailed reviews of 2003-07. If C4′s finest years were always and ever its viewers own, ahem, formative years, then here is the evidence. In the finest tradition of the channel’s founding fathers, it is now up to you to make up your own mind.
